Alright guys, let’s have a closer look at Pat Metheny’s “Have you heard” solo. Needless to say, if you are the person reading this, you already know that “Have you heard” is the first track of Metheny’s 1989 release “Letter from Home”.

Now if you haven't checked my previous blogs “Pat Metheny’s Technique PART I and PART II" that I did earlier, please do check them out first because they are kind of mandatory before going into this solo.

All the little details I talked about in these technique videos will show up and connect in this solo, so again make sure to go through them first.

Please also note that I will not go into too much detail about the note and scale choices in this video. I just assume that you as the reader already have a basic understanding of the chord scale relationship and all of that.

I also assume that you are at a level where you always maybe wanted to learn a Pat Metheny solo but never dared to do it. And my goal is to give you a little toolbox so that you can play them more smoothly and also learn other solos of his in the future by yourself. I would like to provide you with essential tricks that the original songbooks from Hal Leonard don't really provide to make it sound more authentic. I will show you another layer to this and help you to demystify them.

You can find my full guitar transcription free for download at the bottom of the page.

Let’s go straight to the first four bars of the solo. The first bar is already a good example of when I said that Pat inverts the downstrokes to upstrokes in his right hand. This is an easy one because he actually has the time to do it and there is not some crazy chromatic line going on yet. This falls into the category of "using upstrokes for melodious passages".

It’s just simple eighth and quarter notes going up the C minor pentatonic, so nothing really busy.

Then we go to this position and everything is still in C minor pentatonic / C Dorian. The rhythm is a little open and loose here but this passage would be up to you how to pick it because it’s simple and singable and there shouldn’t be any technical problems.

But when you get to the 4th bar, you will encounter the first busy part, which would be the perfect opportunity to invert our right-hand picking and mix it up with some pull-offs.

You will see Pat doing this movement a lot in his solos when the phrase has a descending motion and he does a pull-off on each string to get to the target note. Which in this case is the minor 3rd of Fm7. He is basically just adding a C7 before the Fm7 (or C7alt, or C7mixob9b13, however, you want to think about it) to build up some tension before going into the Fm7.

In bar 6 we can find the little exception to the rule that I mentioned in my technique video where you want to quickly switch back to alternate pickingwhen you have a phrase starting with two or more consecutive sixteenth notes on one string. There is nothing to pull off or hammer into so it just wouldn’t make sense to invert anything here. So in these cases, keep everything normal!

But when you get to the next phrase from bar 9, you will need to switch and do almost all of the things combined I talked about in the Technique videos. You will encounter inverted picking, hammer-ons from nowhere and descending thirds:

So I do think that Pat thinks Db7 in bar 8 for a short amount of time before going into theAb7 and G7. If you think of this as Db7 you would play the Root, 3rd and 5th.

And every time he plays a triad, he usually starts with two downstrokes. You can see that perfectly in one of his warm-up seminars that you can find on YT. I guess I should have added that to the list of guidelines but I think at this point we already have enough things to watch out for in this Solo.

Again I don’t want to get too much into the analysis, scales, and note choices, otherwise, this blog would go on for another 300 pages, so let’s get back to the technical aspects of this.

The C in bar 9 on the third string would fall into the category of “hammer-ons from nowhere”, so we just hammer this note from out of nowhere, and then we’re back into picking everything starting with an upstroke in this case. You can see that this little hammer-on from nowhere bought you that micro second to keep the flow going. If you would pick that note the whole flow would probably fall apart or would been interrupted. Everything ends with his famous descending minor thirds lick in bar 10.

Now if you feel that there is too much hammering going on, simply add just a few attacks here and there. Whatever you can catch I guess! But you will notice that picking will interrupt that flow I talked about in the earlier videos. It’s almost like you are switching the gear in your car while driving when you lose this flow.

Now I don’t have any visual proof of this particular album version of this solo, but looking at a lot of grainy live footage, in slow motion and doing a lot of comparing with other solos of his, I would just assume he does it this way. This is just my best guess and I could be wrong, so feel free to send me an email saying “ Oh I think there is a downstroke in bar 352 on this XYZ chord”. I’ll be happy to geek out with you on these things, but for now, let’s just do it my way, so just follow along.

Alright, so let’s go with the next busy phrase. When it comes to the right hand the first bar is basically up to you. But right at the beginning of the next bar, you will encounter 4 consecutive sixteenth notes on one string, so we will switch to alternate picking for a second there:

Right after that, we will switch everything back.

And bar 15 is the perfect example of that flow that I was talking about:

The sequence in bar 16 I guess would be up to you again. Inverting the picking directions doesn’t really make difference here, but when you reach the end of the bar, I’m pretty sure he would switch it again. That is the same descending motion and the same trick that we had a few bars before with even more strings now. I hope you can actually feel it in your right hand, how even long stretches like this will feel much easier and you don’t have to hold your breath all time while playing. Invert the picking directions, skip picking the downbeats, and throw in some of the hammer-ons out of nowhere and everything should be way more easygoing.

So bar 18 is all up strokes with F Dorian I would assume. But then switch it back and you will encounter descending 3rds for just a moment when goin back into the Cm7:

Next Phrase in bar 20-21. I love this one. You definitely heard this one before. In case you haven’t noticed, the chord progression is basically a C minor blues. So there are a ton of phrases in here you could take inspiration from.

I would assume Pat thinks Eb7 here, before going into the Ab7. So if he thinks Eb7 here, we would start with the root, 3rd and 5th right? And as I have mentioned earlier, Pat usually starts these major triads with two downstrokes. So we would start with two downstrokes.

Alright, so let’s do maybe one more phrase for now. The beginning of the next phrase in bar 23 I would say belongs to the consecutive sixteenth notes played on one string category. Although the second note is played on the next string, I think we can categorize it as this:

When we get to bar 25, not only do we have to invert our picking again, but we are going smoothly into a long stretch of descending 3rds and we immediately ascend again after that by using the pull-off lick that you also saw earlier:

Alright, I think that’s enough information to take in if this is your first Pat Metheny guitar solo. So take your time with this, obviously do it slowly first and try to apply and catch these picking directions and all the little nuances.

At this point, we are approximately a third into the solo, so most of the guidelines I was talking about in the technique blogs probably showed up at this point.

I would highly recommend going through this first part very thoroughly and slowly because you will need all these little tricks in order to move on to the next part obviously. They will definitely show up again very soon. The good news is that it will get a bit easier once you’re getting used to these techniques.

I will probably do a separate blog on how to actually memorize a long solo like this. Taking in so much musical information and then making it stick in your mind is kind of a skill that you have to work on at some point anyway, but that’s a blog for another day.

You can find my entire guitar transcription of Pat Metheny’s “Have You Heard” right here:

Have a successful practicing session and I will see you in the next part!

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